oh sweet n low...

like a shiny-new rubix cube, fresh off the boat from some korean conveyor belt; that's what this fucking city looked like to me sometime not that long ago, but also an outrageously long time ago. i'd spit on my calender, or 3 or 4 that would defy what unsettling truths i know well in my bones...BUT-why acknowledge your enemies by spitting at them, when really? i'd rather just act like they don't exist at all.In life, as with me and my pathological aversion to time-keeping functionality... the best and worst of things are borne of apathy.I don't hate the unnatural sense of having lived several lives before i hit 26 years young. i just don't care... and even as i sit here typing such a statement; one that is pretty ripe for patent application of (really overreaching and expired) psychoanalysis. i think that my utter and profound lack of concern for this giant beast called TIME, is only worth talking about because i have a stunning and unretouched account of such a fatal flaw in my own character...that, by definition, i might just be your textbook sociopath- nothing more, nothing less, and certainly nothing your shrink and mine couldn't use for some mental batting practice just so they don't forget whyyy they got into mental health in the first place. i remember things in third person, at least 99% of the time. what's more damning though, is that the whole process of 'remembering' things is not always a conscious,rational decision i can choose to engage in...specifically, i have developed an alarmingly high-threshold for what i am able to just not accept as some event/incident/person that happened to me. only in recent months, actually, have i been forced by the imploding layers of my wrong answers and failed long-division answers that were as wrong and as useless as an unsolvable puzzle, or a shiny new rubix cube in the hands of a colorblind guy... like a calendar still blank because i have no idea how to make sense of this hostile and impatient witness who is better left alone than being filled with unimaginable plans that never were, and in my mind's eye they were the kind of awesome fiction where you know it's made up and it's silly or you've maybe by accident-on-purpose-oops-i-couldn't-just-wait, MAYBE you stole a peek at the ending already and you know that whatever this climax might threaten to change? Well that's all been done before, and so has my plan-making via story-telling within a neat little package called a mother-fucking CALENDAR.somewhere in between that glorious and untouched moment in time where i know-although i certainly don't FEEL, as i would feel someone pinch me right this minute, for instance- somewhere between when I knew that this city, unexplored and bloated with my lust for it all, the freaking entire isle of my dreams was a veritable rubix cube itself; all steel and cement and raw survival at the core of it all.what little i remember in terms not so broad- well, it usually involves how i felt just AFTER.as in, how i burned and how i recoiled back from just having realized my whole final answer was just wrong, and so deeply flawed at its root that it was not just the train on the tracks that could be held accountable for ruining and defacing and blasting apart my otherwise-solvable puzzle; all shiny and teeming with potential for brilliantly splayed out proof of not only my clever mind, but also ready to evidence how charming a right answer appears to a relieved and clearly-persistent hard worker.but some crazy-ass shit went down, i guess... in the interim between then and now. to describe it in less cost-effective syntax might jeopardize this whole aura of apathetic indifference i've rallied around now for a page or two at least...but yeah, pages get turned- even if you don't mean to, really, but you kind of already knew you were going to cheat yourself out of the process of getting to the right answer- and you focused too much on just getting an answer to the daunting equation; and just disregarding how to go about getting the RIGHT answer-so you never realize the glaring mistake in the numbers up top, and you'll keep sweating over your graph paper with a growing sense of acceptance that your shit was just wrong, wrong, WRONG so far back that it's come down to this: flip your number two upside-down and roll your sleeves up and just erase all you've just done and the equation itself too, because now you can't even read it, can't make it out clearly from all the crap that you're unleashing everywhere by the harrowing decision you made to admit-to yourself, not even in that weird, nearly-audible, inner-monologue, fred-savage-on-the-wonder-years-has-his-every-thought-narrated-by-a-seriously-creepy-grown-man-from-Home-Alone......no, you don't even have to admit it that much. it's one of those moments where- just for a split, split second in the midst of your thoughts which always seem to be unfairly out in front beyond your ability to act accordingly, or to react appropriately at least...yeah, all i had to do was take that instant where i KNEW how off, off,JUST FUCKING OFF i must be to not even be capable of backtracking and rectifying anything...because it seems that in that tiny moment of blinding recognition?i saw something that resembled my misguided attempt at second-grade arithmetic, and i saw something that might have easily been a rubix cube unfixable, as useless as my impulse-buy in the planner aisle at Walgreens- you know, next to the calculators which would have similar banal qualities to this particular Walgreens troller in Aisle 5.(i wish i didn't see the miscalculated first line of a 56-line conundrum which all but destroyed an entire tree through the fruits of my labor...graph paper, pencil sharpeners, eraser-gum-rubber-crap now sidearmed and sucker-punched and thrown aside because, afterall-it is garbage, and i am its creator. its useless to me, and i unwillingly take a look ahead to the end of the book- it's morbid, and its self-sabotaging excorcising the worst of irrational contradictions we all have to fight (sometimes harder than seems normal or whatever) to keep from surfacing....but yeah, i rubbernecked at a horrendous car fire on the side of the road. i looked AGAIN and again until i thought i heard my eyes rolling in my skull at that sickening and flat-out inescapable sight which i kept turning my head towards, despite knowing full-fucking-well how close to my lips the vomit ran up this time around....and when that split second of ugly and stark naked under a 60-watt halogen white tube light type of a moment happened to me for the very FIRST time?well i simply did what was the path of most resistance- i acted like i'd never noticed the fucking problem and kept my nose down just a tad closer to the grindstone than before-because obviously i was looking around far too much if i got a clear enough look at all the damage i'd done to already know- TO KNOW in my bones and not because of anything more logical or rational or tangible than that- that the only other option besides being that kid in the middle of a tense and silent test, with minutes left before time is called, THAT kid who frantically flips his pencil and furiously begins to erase some egregious comedy of errors on the thin graph paper with the shitty eraser-school issued, no doubt-and as that kid has the tedious task he's set before him now, he absolutely feels the smug relief and sideways presence of interested peers and their nosy peepers on his back, as they are glad they don't KNOW in the way that I knew that everything was all wrong. Because the rest of those idiots who had long-since flipped their own test over in a triumphant and suggestive move that only fools could execute with genuine confidence- they silently and psychically pity/contemplate/lecture/tease THAT kid who has just shown his hand, and in that moment?he's the smartest one in the room...no doubt, he is tapping his foot on the tile faster than ever-and he is literally on the edge of his metal seat nailed down to the linoleum, rigid with the pressure he's just put on himself to do something ALMOST as terrifying as admitting defeat to himself and his peers:He has nothing left to lose-a blank answer is just as wrong as the one he KNEW to be incorrect and cracked to the core...so no partial credit or bonus points for approach could have worked out there...it's time to start from mother-fucking scratch and begin anew. long-division isn't really long-division without the juice, the meat, the good shit between the blank answer box and the smugly-approved specific number sequence which, really means nothing without its context-like a colorblind rubix cube fan could not tell you the purpose of ever turning the sides of the plastic puzzle at all....i mean, that shiny perfection fresh from the packaging turns out to be indistinguishable from the sought-after state of a 'solved', correctly worked-out and perspiration-soaked rubix cube at its completion.the colorblind person, standing in opposition to this puzzle whose purpose lies in the perennial PROCESS of undoing the known for the sake of a CHANCE that you have a knack for seeing and perceiving and looking ahead to choreograph your next move...and you turn while you twist and who cares if its ugly now- the puzzle is just that, and the beauty isn't in the answer at all. (you just had that, and that wasn't so riveting right?)nah, the puzzle is all jumbled and random and scattered and changed-perhaps indefinitely...BUT as sure as it is that you have no guarantee of ever getting it right again?you have a chance...and i guess that's better than refusing to suck it up, mess it all up when you know you have the wrong wrong WRONG answer- and even though its a shame and you're frustrated by the time you spent being wrong, and the shame and the pity and the smug,ignorant way that everyone BUT you is able to shrug you off as a little bit less than themselves...(at least, it sure feels that way now doesn't it?)yeah it's fucking tragic but starting all over in the hopes of getting it right-after being honest enough with yourself to take the EASY way out and scrap all the false starts/wrong-way-down-a-one-way-street tickets that should have been tow trucks and funerals/and to cut your stupid losses as you perceive them to be and just stop going in a direction you know, you know, YOU KNOW is not the one you meant to take..and you already KNOW it, in your strings of boney calcified degrading ruins in your elbows, your back, fingers and toes- these prematurely-young and alarmingly resilient bones already know that they're all heading down a pointless path and there's no resistence in them because i have all at once internalized such a truth as this- that my decisions and my beliefs, and my value systems of moral hierarchies-some archaic and flaccid by design, sure- yeah yeah yeah! the whole fucking thing doesn't compute and my internal calculator got crushed in my internal backpack i guess...because its steering me wrong and i am so ashamed to blow those eraser shavings around in a symbolic gesture of my own undoing and my own shaken understanding that somewhere, deep down... even deeper and even downer than those petrified fossils beneath my flesh which propel me and hold me up on my own two feet-usually...but not today, as it were. today i stumble, and i waver for just the briefest of seconds, if at all. in clarity comes action, as the kid who's left sweaty and panting and less an insubordinate-assigned regulation pencil by the end of the school day.but for some weird and freudian-begging reason? clarity brought about quite the opposite in my life and in my approach to it. whereas the rubix cube only makes sense if its been torn to its core; and the plot only thickens when you save the last chapter for last; and how a long-division problem isn't defined by the happenstance numerics a calculator will spit out every time...no, i saw the writing on the wall because i wrote it myself. in pen...as if it were the sunday crossword puzzle in the new york times and i was in an oversized studio in Gramercy Park debating the nuances of such a 'devil-may-care' stance on the bed where i made more mistakes than i could have ever erased with all the gum-trees that mr. meade could hack down in a lifetime.i saw clarity, and i'm not a fucking cliche-monster, and i am NOT going to sit here and tell you that, 'alas, i saw it too late...'because i don't feel like actually killing myself today.so instead, i'll tell you the truth and it happened like this: i saw that i fucked up and so badly and so deeply penetrated my flesh and the fiber of my BONES, even...that i took the bullet in my teeth and i, without so much as a moments' hesitation in whether or not to let the blood flow and thus, begin the long and scarring and jarring and jading and making sense again process of HEALING? Well i had no amount of strength left to even discount my bones and all they screamed in every direction at me, from within- i saw my unraveling, my imploding, and i swallowed that fucking bullet and i washed it down with some apathy and some way, in turning some other way, i managed to swallow that fucker just fine.i took the truth and i buried it so scarily well and with such unprovoked indifference, as unquestioning in this regard as i had always been towards my foresight and stellar survivalist traits-none the least, of course, being a sense of self-awareness that begins with every lawyer's wet dream: knowing and owning your fucked up flaws, and being fully present in your decisions even if you know they are bad ones.so here it goes...i went down with my eyes WIDE open, a blessing and a curse in that i will never 'fly by the seat of my pants' in the way that thelma and maybe even louise (?) could have possibly meant it... time out- it was definitely neither one of those crazy broads, but rather it was (my personal pic for what movie i'd like to actually hop into and just never return from...)VIV-babe as a hooker with a heart of gold in pretty woman. touche. (but i digress. seriously?)game on: and unlike what i would do with a perfectly-in-tact shrink-wrapped rubix cube still smelling of the greasy cheap labor who assembled the damn thing- unlike how that piece of simple plastic might move me to genius (or not, but at least it would move me to TRY)...in real life, after the t.v. gets turned off for the night and even my book is too heavy to hold anymore, and he's already snoring and elbowing me and annoyed because there's something just too fucking WRONG about me...... yeah, in real life-those crazy beautiful terrifying last seconds of lucidity before sleep takes me blissward?i can do NOTHING at all. i am totally and completely and suffocatingly consumed by my unprecedented and paralyzing self-doubt. Never before, never still has a feeling and not a particular recollection-as in an event, a person, an instance or a remarkable conversation- actually made such a crevice in my painstakingly-smoothed-over and perfected surface of certainty. not ever, and simply never never had i any reason to just FORGET to remember something.now things looked so different, though- that in what little time any seemingly 'together' and mobile functioning member of society can achieve such a feat, i did. i somehow learned almost at once, how to just forget things were happening to me, even before they were over and done with...i have never so much as felt a twinge of regret or remorse-even for myself, for my own sense of pride and well-being-for anything i've done in the hours, days, weeks, months, and now-years that came to pass between then and now.no guilt, no remorse, no glee- which confirms the modern guidelines' diagnosis proper, in that i'm not acutally a psychopath per se; just a sociopath..defined precisely by an utter and total disregard and lack of concern for consequences of my actions both towards others as well as (and most telling, i would think they will say someday...) a deep sense of ambivilence and apathy regarding those consequences i've now borne upon myself- like jail, shame, poverty, suffering, mutilated facial wounds, and we go on from here........but i simply remember all of these would-be traumatic inciting momemnts in my recent past as a fuzzy, albeit emotionally vapid set of shitty and depressing type-circumstances...its almost as if someone is on oprah at 4 a.m. when i'm putting off that sleep-wake-sleep transition state i have come to dread from a place deeper than i am aware that i had bones in...anyway, and this idiot on oprah is just telling on herself, anecdote after anecdote...delusional, depressed, and self-loathing, no doubt. but obviously removed enough from the emotion to go on the world-syndicated beast that is oprah's show and calmly discuss this shitstorm of events without so much as a bit/bloody lower lip.that's something..and that's how it is for me. even as the 'shitstorm' is brewing in the dust around my feet-and long before it settles again, after some awkwardly-ineffective cosmic 'wake-up call'? well i just cant seem to CARE one way or another in the way that a protagonist in the first-person cares as he narrates his own story much much more than, say, some shitty author who choses to eek out 3rd person in a faux-memoir/a la pam anderson-who i might add, is a new york times mother fucking bestselling author by now. which, yep-you guessed it...although rage makes for some great writing? its about as authentic as pam herself. at least, her actual bod obviously. i'm sure she's a freakin blast to get fucked up with though. (call me pam!) and so it goes, it was the best of times and then- well, and then it was just the worst of times. and whatever times are to come, i am scared like i just fucked up your rubix cube and suddenly we were both stricken colorblind.yeah, better/worse, it's pretty much a matter of whether i had sweet and low in my coffee today... but one way or the other, i know the things that i erase and attempt again will not be as they once would have been so monumentally-and-heroically avenged without rest.i don't know how to care again, but at least somewhere in the here and now- something snapped, or maybe it was just a little hairline fracture in one of those bones deep down that you don't REALLY need... like your pinky toe?anyway, something is crackling somewhere in me that makes me WANT TO care about something, or someone, or some place, even. anything at all. i dont even know if i can stomach the angst i have literally just dragged through my esophogus and out between clenched teeth and jaws, although its certainly less of a tight squeeze now with that missing fucking tooth and all... sometime i will care enough to see a dentist. until then, i will be rollin at least 25 sugar packets/day deep and you will care even less than i do about it, believe it. i want to care, and i want to matter and i want it to matter to me so much so that i FEEL the pain and the pride swelling and i don't choke it back and the hope and the letdown and the overwhelming and inflatable heat stroke in my heart that i KNOW other people allow themselves to feel in their bones... and i want to put all my eggs in one fucking awesomely-decked-out basket. and i want all the glory and all the thrill of all that could hold in store for me, terrible and magnificent and all the nonsense in between.it's like i've been in this catatonic...no not really. more like a katy bug-ish state. or a caterpillar, even. (cliche-police and writers better than I, knock yourselves out, i'm yours for the taking!)it will never look the same ever again... i want to feel it all again and after i watched my rubix cube become a permanent part of Metro North commuters' spectacle- I didn't even let myself THINK about jumping on the tracks... or about doing anything. like it was me who fell before that train -and not my $8 cube of endless frustration (and distracting metaphors)- the blow of my own life suddenly clear as day and ugly as michael jackson (post-thriller, of course,) shook me to my bones, i couldn't i couldn't i did not take it and i poorly chose to let the rumbling shake me till i'm still. *(thanks charlotte martin for the stellar and eerily-understood cryptic brilliance. rock on.)*I fell, and like a train slammed me with my own reality and misguided failures all at once, i fell from the weight of it all. ...and you know what? unharmed, i am not. the weight of being 'weightless' with inaction so long now has actually proved more unsettling than taking a gamble and just scrapping it and starting all over for a shot at making it even a little bit more like RIGHT.and yeah, that rubix cube got its ass kicked by the subway at 59th and 8th last summer. i was still holding the fucking plastic box it came in in my hand as it rolled away from me and to its violent death... and math without a texas instrument... (ti-89 anyone? that's right. i said it.)... is still as unworkable and useless as a sunday times on a monday afternoon when its way too late to get another copy, and you just realized you blew the whole damn puzzle with one wrong guess, about 7 clues and wrong guesses back... and you boldly defaced it in INK, of course. Non-erasable kind-as if this type of half-hearted pen could sabotage my proud result-of lore only now-in true to form all-or-nothingness. ha!and every now and then i see it before i feel it, and i stop and i let it flow through me from the bones that i kind of forgot could hold such a great deal of consensed fluids or something... nasty.but yeah, i hate it i think- which is progress for sure. and this trusting myself to feel everything again-even if its one at a time? that is my 'process', it's how i'm getting to an answer that looks like its closer to RIGHT than before...and if not, than square one and rips in my graph paper are just around the bend i suppose.i can still mourn my rubix cube...but i think its pretty much time to stop mourning the first of my 'lifetimes' and just get on with my life...